Not that I don't enjoy Christmas, seeing it rather as a nice tradition than a religious holiday, but just for interest: Is there any atheist equivalent to Christmas? Since there is some kind of equivalent in almost any other religion?

Kwanzaa is non-religious, but it is not specifically atheist and I think a lot of people who practice it are also members of one religion or another.

I've been an atheist since I was about 8 but I still love Christmas. I don't need much of an excuse for merry making, but having people join you in it can be special. Never miss an opportunity for a feast.

Also: it makes a lot of sense to me that Xmas largely derives from, or at least gained popularity because of, ancient "pagan" ceremonies marking the winter solstice. Which I consider solstices important, non-religious events. The longest night of the year and all.

yeah i just thought this may be a spice to the christmas holidays .. any way you got a point this is not a chatroom. This is a classroom. so guys lets get back to programming.

You think that setting people off arguing religion and politics is a "way to spice up the christmas holidays"?
Well, let me just add that I'm real glad you're not coming to dinner!

And this isn't a classroom either...
There are no teachers here and it's not any of our jobs to teach programming.
This is simply a place where people volunteer their time to help others debug their code.

Also: it makes a lot of sense to me that Xmas largely derives from, or at least gained popularity because of, ancient "pagan" ceremonies marking the winter solstice. Which I consider solstices important, non-religious events. The longest night of the year and all.

Talking about Winter solstice, it is amazing..that just about every culture celebrates it, in somewhat similar ways..since ancient times.
I'm quite tempted to accept Daniken's theory about how this got synchronized.

I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.